Coding Workshop
                    Learning to Program with an Arduino
                            Lecture Notes
        Table of Contents
          Programming
             Introduction
             Values
               Assignment
               Arithmetic
             Control
               Tests
               If Blocks
               For Blocks
             Functions
               Arduino Main Functions
               Arduino Hardware Functions
       How?
          I Programming doesn’t have to be scary, in fact much easier
            than French or Spanish!
          I With just a few keywords, should be able to write many
            simple programs
          I Here’s an example of a simple program:
            print("Hello, World!")
          I It consists of a function, print( ) ,andavalue,
            "Hello, World!" ; we will come back to these later
          I It is written in a popular and fairly easy language, python; We
            encourage you to learn this if you gain an interest in coding!
       How?
          I The Arduino uses a slightly stricter language, a dialect of
            C++
          I The patterns you learn here will in fact work in many
            languages (‘C-like’ languages, which unfortunately does not
            include python)
          I Don’t worry if you don’t take everything in first time round!
            Wehave provided a cheat sheet, and there are some exercises
            for you to try which should help you put these concepts into
            practice
          I Hopefully you will come to realise that writing programs is
            just breaking down tasks into simple instructions so that a
            stupid computer can repeat them; In reality you do not need
            to know much to write any program, as computers do not
            understand many di↵erent instructions, and only a very few
            are actually necessary
           C++Values
                  I Values are items of data, and in C++ it is quite important to
                     explicitly distinguish between di↵erent types of data
                  I Most important are numbers; there are two main types:
                       I Whole numbers, known as int ; e.g. 3 , -4
                       I Decimal numbers, known as float ; e.g. 3.0 , 2.71
                  I We will also need truth values, known as bool ,i.e. true
                     and false
                  I In an earlier example you also met textual data; we shouldn’t
                     need it here but we refer to single letters/numbers/etc as
                     char , e.g. ’%’ , and blocks of text as char[] , e.g.
                     "Hello, World!"
           Assignment
                  I Believe it or not, you’re almost ready to program!
                  I Firstly, it will be nice to be able to remember values; we do
                     this through assignment:
                       I Let’s analyse a simple example, int x = 7;
                       I First note that we had to declare what type of value x is;
                          Computers are a bit stupid, and so sometimes we have to help
                          them along a bit
                       I This is also why we include a semicolon; Though languages
                          can di↵er in the way they’re written, most have punctuation to
                          indicate the end of an instruction or statement
                       I We can now use x to refer to 7 whenever we like!
                       I We can also change x at any time, in this way the = sign
                          di↵ers from maths– x = 42; –note that we have now changed
                          the value of x , also note that the computer has already been
                          told that x is a whole number, and it doesn’t like to be told
                          twice!
        Manipulating Values
             I Computers excel at arithmetic and decisions, and almost all
               computation is simple combinations of these
             I Arithmetic is achieved as simply as using the following four
               symbols: + , - , * , / , with parentheses where appropriate!
             I Computers are quite strict, and dividing whole numbers will
               give you the quotient, you can get the remainder with %
             I Continuing on with our example, let’s try to find the product
               of 7 and 6:
                int x = 7;
                int y = 6;
                x = x * y;
             I You may wonder whether the last line makes sense... In
               algebra this would mean y =1orx = 0, but here the = sign
               means assignment, so the computer first works out the answer
               on the right, and then assigns it to the name on the left
        Conditions and Control
             I The last thing we need to be able to write any program is the
               ability to make decisions
             I We will consider two decision making structures or blocks:
                if and for (there are others but they don’t really do
               anything else)
             I if lets you decide whether to run a block of code (set of
               statements) based on a previous result, for example if x is
               even; it is often accompanied by else which runs a di↵erent
               block otherwise
             I for lets you run a block of code multiple times, ‘for every
               time that something is true’, though it is easier to think of as
               doing something for every number in a given range